More successful, but pinched at either end by the more grown up Shoot! and the younger Roy Of The Rovers was Scoop, which anticipated the modern footballer with the strip Stark: Matchwinner For Hire. Another feature was a fantasy British Super League where Merseyside (the best players from Liverpool and Everton) could play Thames North (Spurs and Arsenal) with the results calculated by "computer" (the back of a fag packet over a pub lunch?). Beano offshoot Plug (which closely followed Cheeky comic - a policy of boosting the morale of ugly kids?) had its own football strip Antchester United where Mantis Buchan and Kevin Beetle plied their trade under the multiple watchful eyes of Sir Matt Bugsy. (btw Does anyone remeber Top Soccer? I can't find anything about it online - I'm sure I didn't dream it).
I must say I did a double take when I saw this Star Lord cover:

Any love out there for the lesser loved comics?

*edit* Whoops! That pic came out a lot bigger than I expected.

Action comics in s box in the cellar.
It was very violent for the 1970s and I remember there being a couple of tabliod outrage stories at the time.
It ended up amalgamated with Battle.

...Commando* anthologies, but I'd love to see its sci-fi sister Starblazer similarly collected.

*Boy's war stories written and drawn by people who weren't wearing any underwear.

I'm not sure if this was ever a weekly comic, but Willy The Kid by Bash Streets Kids creator Leo Baxendale was a joy. I only ever saw it come out an annual a few times in the late 70's, which was a shame as it was a much funnier, anarchic and rude read than any other British comics of the time

We used to buy a few every week and our granny used to stockpile them and deliver bundles every month or two including the banned-by-my-mother Action and Battle.

Dandy, Whizzer & Chips, Shiver & Shake, Topper, Beezer, Lion, Valiant, Victor, Bullet, Warlord, Hotspur, Hornet and the runt of the litter Sparky. Did anyone else actually buy that miserable publication?

I still have tons of old 2000ADs, most of the Starlords and copies of the short lived political comic Crisis sitting in boxes at my girlfriends house. There's no room for them in our apartment. When I was a teenager, one of my obsessions was the artwork in 2000AD. I used to challenge anyone to open a page at random from any of the piles of comics and I could recognise who had drawn it. I probably still could. I got bored with 2000AD sometime in the 90's but I love the oldies and have bought some of the Dredd, Strontium Dog and Robo-Hunter collections. I'm two books short of the elusive Zenith collection.

absolutely rocked. It was the best proper comic I ever saw.

Anyone remember this?

I don't remember too many of the humourous strips, but there was a great adventure one about robotic dinosaurs (made as cinema special effects) that went on the rampage when their control unit got struck by lightning. The plot was that the kids of their inventor were hunting them down using their knowledge of how they were built.

There were also some pull out and assemble (IE, fold) minicomics called "Badtime Bedtime Storybooks" that I remember lovingly putting together and keeping long after the main comic had been discarded.

nicer quality paper, can't make a monkey out of Gus, actually I loved 'em all.
Anyone remember the Kids from Stalag 41? I think that was in Knockout. Kind of like the Bash Street Kids mixed with Colditz. Very odd topic in retrospect.
Also no mention of Nutty yet - probably cos it was pretty poor ... except it gave us Britain's greatest super-hero: Bananaman!

As a kid I recieved a pile of old British comic annuals from an older cousin, and by far the best was WHAM! A wonderful mid 60's mix of Marvel comic strip reprints and original Leo Baxendale strips like the fab Grimly Feendish - himself immortalized in a song by The Damned

.

My first 'proper' boys comic after escaping Jack & Jill was Boys World, bright and very early '60's, which merged with Eagle, but Boy's World was the first place I saw Asterix The Gaul... the bonus of the merger was getting Dan Dare. Moved onto Ranger featuring the fabulous Trigan Empire... to my horror Ranger then merged with the dreaded Look and Learn, and ever Lord Trigo couldn't keep me buying that sanctimonious bible-bashing tripe. Then it was a side-step to Tiger (original home of Roy of the Rovers?) and Victor - Alf Tupper, The Tough Of The Track... trained on chips, what a dude. Mum didn't like them (for rough boys!) so it was furtive under the covers reading with a torch for a while...

i would hazard that a great number of its characters are now posting here under slightly-amended names...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparky_(comics)

Brilliant. What more did an eleven year old boy want?

And then it got banned. Bastards. All because of a bit of violence. And evisceration. And decapitation. Never did me any harm..

Copies of Lion
Jeff Arnold and the Riders of the Range: http://www.turnipnet.com/whirligig/radio/riders.htm

And then when I got older and my maturity regressed, Electric Soup.

For a period in (I would guess) 1978, The Beano's Editor (you generally only saw him from behind, and sitting at a desk) once announced to all the characters that he was looking for a new star for a new comic.

This involved a competitive process, which was played out over several issues. The eventual winner was Plug - the tall and frighteningly ugly Bash Street Kid. In the 100m race, Plug won (against hot favourite Billy Whizz) because the spikes in his running shoes were so long and sharp that they jabbed him in the behind when he ran(ooyah! yaroo!), propelling him forward.

Plug! as a stand-alone comic didn't last so long. I think it may have even merged with Sparky.

Sparky had a few very funny characters:

Thingummyblob - was simply a silent blob of viscous matter that had a face. He was physically very versatile and got into (and out of) many, many scrapes. He was mute, but his emotions were expressed facially and by words appearing over him, like "REBELLION" or "ANGER" or "REVENGE". A nasty piece of work.

Faceache - he was incredibly well drawn and was a run-of-the-mill boy of about 8. When needed to he could, at will, contort his face into terrifyingly elaborate forms (serpents, rows of fangs, multiple eyes, heads and forked tongues). When the danger passed, he would revert to normal leaving his victim mentally scarred and gibbering. The sound of every transformation into hideousness was "SCRUNGE".

Glad Crisis got a mention but anyone remember Deadline? Closely related to Crisis (they might even have merged - fuzzy on that) and home of the excellent Wired World, London's answer to Love and Rockets.

Also the home of Tank Girl. And writing that has reminded me of the Tank Girl movie...damn...I'd tried so hard to forget that.

Target. New English Library, home of Hells Angels and Skinhead books (which culminated in the glorious exploitation wet dream that was Dragon Skins - Kung Fu meets suedehead!) decided to further cash in on yobbo culture by publishing a comic. Target lasted about a year, featured a character called Bovver Boy, and issue one had a free gift of a packet of Sea monkeys (issue two had the container to keep the re-hydrated critters in).

Where were they from? I used to have a book called The DR & Quinch Guide to Life. The DR stands for diminished responsibility, natch.

It's amazing that characters as extraordinary as Faceache and Creature Teacher slip from your memory but once mentioned it all comes flooding back.
But seriously - does no-one else remember Top Soccer?

Charleys War...I think there are Six books so far..really excellent.

But I'm going to nominate a short=lived American publication called PLOP !

It was a sideways take on the EC horror comics genre. Back in the Seventies, you could only find it once in a while in UK newsagents' comic racks (usually on the south coast) along with reprints of Uncanny Tales, Creepy Worlds et al, Forrest J Ackerman's Famous Monsters Of Filmland and Hammer Horror mag etc. I loved 'em and almost have the complete collection.

The covers were often by Basil Wolverton, the American Ken Reid?

Just found this wonderful YouTube clip

Anyone remember this? Came out around 1990 I think, and lasted about six issues or something. It was patchy but there was some good stuff in there and I always looked forward to it. Some top artists worked on it as well.

I remember a story called Rogan Josh that I would love to read again: a kind of trippy tale about parallel realities and stuff.

is worthy of a mention here. It was a Fleetway reprint title in the 70s but had a great lineup - The Trigan Empire,The Spider, Robot Archie and House of Dollman among others.

Alan Moore had fun with this stable of characters in his Albion series a few years ago when he did a Where are they now?/25 years later story

There's no finer place to spend a cold Sunday afternoon for British comics nostalgia http://lewstringer.blogspot.com/